Metadata Update frequency: Compare to your category!

Thu 19 Mar 2020, 11:00 AMAppTweak Releases

We are proud to announce that there is a new addition to the Timeline Feature! The Update Frequency Benchmark will help you understand how often the top apps in your category update their metadata. Furthermore, you can easily compare your app’s update frequency with your competitors.

AppTweak allows you to take your metadata update strategy to a whole new level!

Competitor view - Understand different strategies

Find out which metadata competitors update the most

As an app, it’s important to benchmark yourself against other apps in your industry. In AppTweak, thanks to our Update Frequency Benchmark, you can now compare your app’s update strategy with others.

Once you have selected a peer group you think is comparable to your app, you can discover which competitor updates their app more frequently, and who nearly never updates their apps. What we show you is, according to the date range selected, the number of updates that happened during this period of time.

Here, we selected the app Expedia and compared it to 2 other booking apps (Hotels.com & Agoda) As we can see, you can directly pinpoint which app is going for a different strategy. Indeed, Expedia is putting more efforts on updating its Feature Graphic and its Videos while Agoda is more focused on changing its long description and Hotels.com, its screenshots.

Three different strategies are displayed here.You can click on the metadata history and see exactly what changes were made by Hotels.com & Agoda.

Here, for instance, we see that Hotels.com is regularly changing its screenshots by A/B testing small details of the picture such as the screen of the phone or the slogan. On average, Hotels.com changes or A/B tests its screenshots every month, as a result, you can see the last versions they updated for each month and learn what worked for them and what did not.

Spy on competitor’s seasonal update strategy

Thanks to AppTweak, you can also quickly understand what is happening during specific events or seasons. What we show you is a representation per selected period of what your competitors are doing in terms of updates.

Here, we see the example of Candy Crush during the Christmas period and we selected three other gaming apps (Toon Blast, Farm Heroes Saga and Toy Blast). Thanks to this view, you can directly pinpoint that the only metadata they focus on are the screenshots, the icon and the description. Moreover, we identify two different update strategies, the first one is Toy Blast’s strategy of putting more efforts on Screenshots and their description. On the other hand, Candy Crush is more focused on changing their icon and their screenshots. In addition, it is very informative to see that Toy Blast is the one doing the most updates in terms of screenshots and that Toon Blast is doing nothing at all.

These two combinations can help you understand what your competitors are doing and by going back to the Timeline or the Metadata history you can see if you update at the same time as your competitor or differentiate yourself.

Benchmark - Ahead or behind the category?

You may be wondering if you could compare your metadata update strategy to a broader sample, maybe more representative. This is why we came up with another view, the category benchmark view, enabling you to compare your metadata updates to the top downloaded apps of your category.

Identify metadata update trends in your category

If you want to see what your category is doing over the course of one year, you can switch to the benchmark view. In this section, you can see if your strategy is aligned with the rest of the category

Here we took the example of Expedia, which belongs to the category “Travel and Local”. As it was previously shown, Expedia is more focused on changing its Feature Graphic, Description and Videos. However, with our spider graph, you quickly see that their category is not on the same track. It puts more effort on the Screenshots and the Short Description.

From this insight, you can adapt your strategy and see what others are doing with their metadata and maybe follow the same trends. But how do you get ideas to improve your updating strategy? Read the section below to figure it out!

Learn from the best

We added a table below the graph showing the apps that change their metadata most often in your category. It is very useful if you want to get inspired from their updates.

In the screenshot above, we show that Expedia can get inspiration for its short description by looking at apps that put more efforts on updating this metadata. You can also see that Hopper has completed 60 updates in 2019. It could be a good idea to check these updates out and learn from their tests!

You simply need to click on the icon to see the metadata history. Quick and easy, don’t hesitate to learn from these top downloaded apps.

Calculation method

Depending on the number of top apps you selected in your category (top 5, 10 or 30) we computed the average number of updates for these top apps and is what you see represented on the spider graph.

Moreover, the total changes of metadata represent the addition of your metadata updates throughout the year and the average of your category in 2019.

Finally, the Benchmark is calculated over the fixed period of 2019. Therefore, when you change the date range, we will show you the data for your app during the date range selected but for the benchmark, we take the information for the year of 2019 and we extrapolate the data on the same date range. As a result, you can compare similar situations. However, we recommend looking at a minimum of 3 months to have a good understanding of the situation.

Start fine-tuning your strategy

The Update Frequency Benchmark feature will help you in many ways. It gives you quick and understandable information that will help you make strategic decisions. Here is a summary of what is waiting for you:

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